Video data and signals generally require a high amount of bandwidth for communication over a wired and/or wireless data network, or over a direct peer-to-peer connection. Furthermore, increasingly ubiquitous utilizations of high-definition video codec standards for television broadcasts, Internet video broadcasts, Internet video telephony, and other multimedia-related applications are consuming and requiring high bit transfer rates (i.e. large bandwidths) over the wired and/or wireless data network for reliable transmission and display of the video data in real time.
In case of Internet-related video broadcasts and applications, image quality degradations, real-time video playback interruptions, and/or other quality-of-service limitations are common due to the large bandwidth requirements in transferring the video data over the Internet. This is especially true for transmission of high-definition videos. Furthermore, some television and other multimedia broadcasters are no longer satisfied with standard digital television standards, or even with the high-definition television (HDTV) standards (e.g. 1080i and 720p), because they prefer to move to higher scan rates (e.g. “4K,” which is approximately 3840×2160 pixels), or higher frame rates (e.g. 120 Hz).
Although various image and video compression standards are attempting to alleviate the high bit-rate requirements of video transmissions by packing an increased data load into increasingly-overworked channels more efficiently, these improvements are still merely gradual and are limited to some newer compression standards.
Therefore, it may be desirable to provide a bit-rate reduction system with a high bit-rate reduction efficiency that can still be utilized for a plurality of existing image and video compression standards, such as JPEG, JPEG2000, MPEG 2/4, h.264, and HEVC, and existing image and video processing equipment, while retaining a high image quality.
It may also be desirable to separate original video data into a main layer processing and a support layer processing within the bit-rate reduction system, so that main layer data and support layer data can be separately processed for a high bit-rate reduction efficiency prior to transmission, while retaining a high image quality upon decoding and combination of the separated video data at a receiving device.
Furthermore, it may also be desirable to incorporate a unique support layer processing method that utilizes a reference images matrix, which simplifies and economizes the support layer data encoding, transmission, and decoding while still retaining a high image quality after the transmission from an encoder-side system to a decoder-side system.